Everything else is negotiable.
TWENTY-FIVE
SOREIA
Isurface through fire.
Not the burning kind—not destruction, not pain. This fire moves through my blood like a second heartbeat, pulsing heat into places that had gone cold and dead. It fills the hollow spaces the poison carved, floods the emptiness where my magic used to live.
I’m not supposed to be alive.
The thought arrives with strange detachment, clinical observation from a mind that hasn’t quite caught up to a body that’s decided to keep functioning. Divine poison doesn’t have antidotes. Anchor witches don’t survive when their magic unravels. The laws of my existence are absolute.
Were absolute.
My eyes open to orange light.
Stone walls curved above me, rough-hewn and ancient. They glow with banked heat—not from any flame I can see, but from the rock itself, as if decades of dragonfire have seeped into the mineral structure and taken up permanent residence.
A cave. His cave.
I know that without knowing how I know it. The air tastes like him—ash and iron and the particular scent of power heldbarely in check. This space is saturated with his presence. His territory in the most literal sense.
And I’m lying on heated stone, breathing air that doesn’t hurt to draw, with dragonfire coursing through my blood that by all rights would have destroyed me.
My body runsdiagnostics without permission.
Old habit. Years of monitoring the slow deterioration that defined my existence have carved grooves into my consciousness that function automatically. Every morning since my power awakened, I’ve cataloged the damage—measured how much the magic cost me overnight, calculated how many days remained in a lifespan that shortened with every breath.
Lungs: functional. No fluid, no strain, no rattle that signals internal bleeding.
Heart: steady. The arrhythmia that had been worsening for months is gone, replaced by a rhythm so stable it hardly feels like mine.
Muscles: responsive. I flex my fingers against the stone beneath me and they obey instantly, no trembling, no weakness.
The poison?—
I search for it. The cold spreading through my blood, the pressure building behind my eyes, the creeping numbness that had been claiming my body territory by territory. The toxin designed specifically to unravel Anchor magic at the source.
Gone.
Not suppressed. Not dormant. Erased, as if it had never existed.
That’s impossible.
I push myself upright too fast. The cave tilts, my vision graying at the edges, and I catch myself on my palms against stone that pulses heat into my skin like a living thing. Three heartbeats to steady. Another two before the world stops spinning.
And then I see him.
Kaster sitsagainst the far wall, watching me.
His body tells the story of what happened—wounds still seeping sluggish blood, bones that haven’t finished knitting, exhaustion carved into every line of his face. The gash across his back has closed but the skin remains raw, angry red against the amber light. His ribs move wrong when he breathes, the rhythm interrupted by fractures that need more time.
By all logic, he’s dead. By all logic, I’m dead. Neither of us followed the script.
“You’re awake.” A statement delivered in the controlled quiet that refuses to give anything away.
I swallow. My throat doesn’t hurt anymore—another impossibility in a growing list. “What did you do?”
